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Sunday, 13 December 2015

My father was fond of proverbs, pieces of folk wisdom that served
as substitutes for a more sustained conversation. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.
‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one
basket’. ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. And – the one that I woke up
thinking about today - ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip’. For me as a
child, these sayings took on an authority indistinguishable from his own. Yet
looking back on them now, what strikes me is how they all, in varying degrees,
encoded an attitude of caution in the
face of the world. I never heard him say, for example, ‘In for a penny, in for
a pound’ – which might have given permission for a more adventurous stance on
life.

The climate change agreement signed in Paris is being hailed
- by the politicians involved, and some environmental advocacy groups – as a ‘historic’
turning point in humanity’s use and abuse of fossil fuels. The intention of the
agreement is clear: the commitment of all major nations – including for the
first time China and India - to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions between now and
2030. But how will that translate into action? While every country is required
to put forward a plan to cut emissions, there is no legal requirement as to
how, or how much, each country must cut. What’s legally binding is that each
nation enact legislation in relation to a low-carbon future, but what is
voluntary seems to be the content of that legislation. ’Twixt cup and lip there’s
an ocean of room for countries to slip away from the high ideals that have
gained assent over these last few weeks.

The agreement seems to be designed to shame countries into
action through peer pressure: countries have to legally monitor, verify and
report on what they are doing, reconvening every five years to publicly report
on progress towards lowering emissions. One can only hope that that this
agreement – ‘Climate Change Agreement In Our Time’ – is not looked back on in
decades to come, as temperatures continue to rise, albeit marginally slower, as
the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement
with Hitler in 1938.

As the festival of Hanukkah comes to an end, and one by one
the last of the candles flickers and dies, the fable of the Temple oil sufficient
for one day that miraculously lasted for eight days comes to mind. Jews have
often used this legend as a symbol of the triumph of Jewish continuity in the
face of forces that have sought to extinguish it. But maybe a more apposite
reading of the story for our time would be to recognise that what would be
truly miraculous – and worthy of celebration – would be if the nations of the
world could find a way of consuming less and making what we have go further.
But this would be a model – self-sacrifice in the service of a common good - that
would overturn capitalism as it's always been practiced.

As long as the nations that are celebrating in Paris today
are wedded to consumerism and growth – and as long as electricity, gas and oil
companies have such a dominant place in the world’s stock markets – it is going
to be very much business as usual. The Paris agreement is a triumph of
presentation over reality. There is no pleasure in saying that, and it is probably
better to have reached this agreement than to have repeated the failures in
Copenhagen in 2009. But it is a consoling fable for our times, and in the
depths of winter we cling to such fables, light in our darkness.

Our planet is still vulnerable and dependent – like the
infant in the Christmas story which also speaks a universal truth at this
season. Over these next decades we are going to find ourselves ’twixt cup and lip – between the good
intentions of Paris and the complex actions that are still needed, and which will have to be maintained over decades when the impact of already-existing higher temperatures will be leading to greater and greater devastation. This will require faith of a very high order. Until
less becomes the new more, I am letting caution be my guide.